RIM, which is headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, traditionally had many Canadian smartphone customers due to RIM being a Canadian company. In 2008, RIM outsold Apple's iPhone by 5-to-1 in Canada, and in 2010, BlackBerry outsold the iPhone by 500,000.

But this customer loyalty was challenged recently when Apple surpassed RIM for the No. 1 spot in smartphone shipments. Last year, RIM shipped 2.08 million BlackBerrys in Canada while Apple shipped 2.85 million iOS-powered devices.

According to Bloomberg, RIM failed to promote its devices once the iPhone came around. After years of being known for innovative smartphones, the company felt it didn't need to promote anymore. But the iPhone began to take over, offering more apps and a user-friendly experience. BlackBerry soon fell way behind, with Google's Android operating system coupled with Samsung, HTC and Motorola phones being Apple's only true competitor.

"For RIM, in its home market, to lose that No. 1 position to iPhone is strategically important," said Paul Taylor, a fund manager at BMO Harris Private Banking in Toronto. "It does identify, even with a home-country bias, how consumers are responding to the greater functionality of the iPhone."

According to Bloomberg analysts, RIM will likely report a fourth-quarter 2011 profit drop of more than half to 82 cents a share. They also expect an 18 percent drop in sales to $4.53 billion.

Apple, on the other hand, more than doubled its profit to $13.1 billion and had a 73 percent rise in revenue to $46.3 billion.

Some of RIM's troubles can likely be attributed to its worldwide blackout last fall, where customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Asia, the United States and Canada lost their BlackBerry services for four days. This outraged many customers who depend on their BlackBerry devices for business as well as personal use. RIM blamed the outage on a system upgrade.

The outage coupled with BlackBerry's lack of apps and user-friendly features has put it behind in the mobile race, but it's not the end for RIM entirely. The mobile company still has some loyal customers in Canada, including the Royal Bank of Canada, the Bank of Nova Scotia, the Bank of Montreal, and Toronto-Dominion Bank, where all continue to issue BlackBerry's to their employees.

If they would at least still make nearly indestructible devices that lasted 3-4 years, and 2-3 days on a charge, they could have kept part of their core market, the business market. But they had to dumb them down to the consumer market, so not only you have a device that can barely do half of what any iOS or Android or WP7 device can do, but they can't last even for the 2 years contract duration (at least it's not a 3 years contract, like you see in Canada). And it ends up being as expensive to buy anyway, not counting the 15$ surcharge per month on the BB data plan.

I manage 30-odd phones, mostly BBs, and since the days of the 8830, it's been downhill, and fast. And while the 9930 brings at last a working touchscreen, it is still an half-assed product. Countless of 9630/9650s dying after a year and half, and so far, I had to replace under warrantly at least half or my brand new 9930s. Nothing comes close to the integration and reliability of BES, but even that went down for days. And the devices can barely do a day on the battery now. The only positive left is the data consumed on a BB vs other smartphones is vastly less (especially a good thing when roaming), but that's probably in part because of the limited use of the browser and app store, vs the efficiency of the BES compression scheme.

Much to my chagrin, we are supposed to start migrating to iPhones pretty soon because it is getting VERY hard to justify the value of staying with RIM vs going to the competition. They had years to refocus, but they just kept digging deeper and deeper.

"I manage 30-odd phones, mostly BBs..... we are supposed to start migrating to iPhones pretty soon because it is getting VERY hard to justify the value of staying with RIM vs going to the competition."

Same here. We have about 450 emp's. 250 or so with company phones. 100 or so BB's left (used to be 100% BB). For the past year all new phones have been iPhone or Android (whichever the end user prefers). Its not that our BES doesn't work perfectly, its that end users are complaining that they don't want another Blackberry to use. Alot of them were just saying, "forget it, I'll pay for my own". It started with several high level managers not wanting a Blackberry, so exceptions were made, then it was approved for everyone. People just dont want them anymore.

End result: RIM's enterprise dominance is all they had left, but they were so far behind on the OS side its even killing the enterprise holdouts.

Oh I agree, that's why I wasn't too happy to have to add iPhones in the mix. They are quite fragile, the battery is non-replacable (definitely something that needs replacing after a while on a BB), and that's not counting all the crap users will want to install on them, and the greater risk of having the device stolen. And you are stuck with that stupid Apple charger, in lieu of a generic micro-USB one.

How easy is it to backup and transfer data between iPhones? Blackberry Desktop was great in that regard, and I hope the same is possible with them.

"This is about the Internet. Everything on the Internet is encrypted. This is not a BlackBerry-only issue. If they can't deal with the Internet, they should shut it off." -- RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis